Deep Learning Architectures For the Prediction of YY1-Mediated Chromatin Loops

YY1-mediated chromatin loops play substantial roles in basic biological processes like gene regulation, cell differentiation, and DNA replication. YY1-mediated chromatin loop prediction is important to understand diverse types of biological processes which may lead to the development of new therapeutics for neurological disorders and cancers. Existing deep learning predictors are capable to predict YY1-mediated chromatin loops in two different cell lines however, they showed limited performance for the prediction of YY1-mediated loops in the same cell lines and suffer significant performance deterioration in cross cell line setting. To provide computational predictors capable of performing large-scale analyses of YY1-mediated loop prediction across multiple cell lines, this paper presents two novel deep learning predictors. The two proposed predictors make use of Word2vec, one hot encoding for sequence representation and long short-term memory, and a convolution neural network along with a gradient flow strategy similar to DenseNet architectures. Both of the predictors are evaluated on two different benchmark datasets of two cell lines HCT116 and K562. Overall the proposed predictors outperform existing DEEPYY1 predictor with an average maximum margin of 4.65%, 7.45% in terms of AUROC, and accuracy, across both of the datases over the independent test sets and 5.1%, 3.2% over 5-fold validation. In terms of cross-cell evaluation, the proposed predictors boast maximum performance enhancements of up to 9.5% and 27.1% in terms of AUROC over HCT116 and K562 datasets.